TBT: A Matter of Race Mattering
My Thoughts on Obama and Race as He Began His General Election Run
I want to flash back 15 years, to a moment before Barack Obama had become president, before Donald Trump, before the Capital Hill insurrection of 2021, before Joe Biden. I want to highlight two columns that I think stand up and speak to our current moment, columns about race and about fossil fuels that are both relevant and seem almost too hopeful.
I’ll post today and tomorrow.
The following column ran originally in The Princeton Packet papers I edited on July 17, 2008. Barack Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination after a battle with former First Lady Hillary Clinton in which race was a central theme. Clinton had spent much of the primary season dog-whistling on race.
Clinton’s record on race, as Ryan Cooper wrote in The Week as the former first lady jumped into the 2016 presidential campaign, was “not great,” and that her 2008 campaign against Obama was replete with “distinctly racist undertones.”
The effort was not so blatant as George H.W. Bush's Willie Horton ad, but the attempt to play on racist attitudes through constant repetition and association was unmistakable — in addition to playing into right-wing conspiracy theories that Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Africa.
Clinton — and her supporters, then and now — will say this argument was overblown, but it was clear at the time that she saw Obama’s race as a potential weakness. And it was consistent with the missed messaging the Clintons had employed during Bill Clinton’s campaigns.
More importantly, it was a precursor of what Obama would be forced to deal with as he moved into the general election and his presidency — including the Birther conspiracy that would catapult Donald Trump into the political maelstrom where he would build a campaign based on White resentment and hate.
Here is the column, which you can find at central jersey.com.
Dispatches: A matter of race mattering
The nomination of the first African-American candidate for president is underscoring a racial divide that exists in this country.
A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend and released Tuesday shows that the views about the candidates — in particular, Barack Obama — differ by race.
”More than 80 percent of black voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama,” the paper reported Wednesday, while “about 30 percent of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of him.”
This poll found other significant differences in perceptions based on race, according to the paper.
”Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites,” the paper said. “Four in 10 blacks say that there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination; fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing. And about one-quarter of white respondents said they thought that too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks.”
Americans like to pretend we live in a color-blind society, but the severe gulf in perception underscores that we still have a long way to go to make this a reality.
Macie Mitchell, a black Democrat from Erie County, Pa., offered an explanation during a followup interview with the paper after participating in the poll:
”Basically it’s the same old problem, the desire for power. People get so obsessed with power and don’t want to share it. There are people who are not used to blacks being on top.”
The results are a troubling indication that race is likely to remain a wild card in the presidential race. Don’t let anyone fool you.
Sen. Obama, the Illinois Democrat, continues to do well in the polls, aided by record disapproval of the current president and his party. But considering that the country is clamoring for change, one might expect Sen. Obama to have garnered a bigger lead in the polls than the 5 percent to 10 percent advantage he’s held in recent weeks.
There are reasons, of course, for why the lead remains as narrow as it is, including the mistaken perception that many still have that Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, is a maverick ready to do battle with the president and his party and questions about Sen. Obama’s experience.
Sen. Obama’s race, however, may be the most important element of all. There remains a significant portion of the electorate that sees Sen. Obama as nothing more than a black man — not as a Harvard graduate, former community organizer, lawyer, state legislator or U.S. Senator, but as a black man.
That, in their eyes, makes him different than the rest of us. It’s why Hillary Clinton’s comment during the primaries — that Sen. Obama lacked “support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” — resonated so strongly.
And while Sen. McCain has said he would not engage in divisive racial politics, we should not expect the conservative media (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh) or other proxies to be so honorable.
After all, it appears there is a receptive audience out there for this kind of ugly rhetoric (one in six whites say that Sen. Obama would favor blacks if elected, according to the poll).
I was at a barbecue recently when Sen. Obama’s candidacy came up. Most of the guests (all of them white) said they were voting for McCain — not because they liked the Arizona Republican, but because they didn’t like Sen. Obama.
”Next thing you know,” one of the guests said, “you’ll have Al Sharpton in the White House.”
It seems pretty clear, whether or not the candidates want to acknowledge it, that race will play a factor come November. The question is how much.
In the end, my hope is that the candidate who is most in tune with voters’ beliefs, who best understands their concerns and offers the most forward-looking plans will win and that race won’t be the determining factor.
I just wouldn’t bet my house on it.